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Please join us for a mass tweet from In Actual Fact on Monday 17th February 8.30-10.00pm when Channel 4 broadcasts ‘Benefits Street: The Last Word’, followed by ‘Benefits Britain: The Debate’.

Head to In Actual Fact for carefully sourced, instantly tweetable anti-austerity facts and select from the full menu of facts to tweet.

In the past few weeks, the battle for TV ratings in the poverty porn genre has heated up. In Actual Fact has been mass tweeting throughout, answering back against austerity propaganda and anti-claimant rhetoric. The numbers of people discovering and using the site have increased week on week, creating a grassroots counter propaganda message that challenges corporate media stereotypes & disinformation.

Channel 4’s provocatively named Benefits Street series was originally scheduled to culminate on Monday 10th February. But so loud was the outcry at the first episode, with demands to remove the series from our screens, that Channel 4 decided to extend the series, in the process maximising profits from increased viewing figures.

So, the following week, on Monday 17 February, the hastily made Benefits Street: The Last Word says it will look at the experience of benefits from the perspective of the street’s residents, some of whom were moved into safe houses at the end of the first programme so vile were the death threats. Immediately after, they will host an hour-long debate on issues raised by the programme. (They don’t say whether this will include broadcaster responsibility, or the conflict of interest between ratings and fair portrayal, or whether informed consent can ever be given by programme subjects who must relinquish the representation of their lives to a production team answering to commercial pressures in an edit suite. This debate show remains under the control of the broadcaster and editorial control rests a right-wing dominated corporate media.)

In a brief gap between programmes, Channel 5 joined the fray, dropping into the schedules its own The Big Benefits Row on Monday 3 February. Just to clarify their agenda, they announced some of their anti-benefits panel members: Katie Hopkins, known for hate-filled rants, and Edwina Currie, an advocate for shutting down food banks and, um, Peter Stringfellow (because he gets a pension). But then something strange happened in that hour. In reply to the fact-free, anti-benefits prejudices, the studio opposition – Jack Monroe, Annabel Giles, Owen Jones, Deidre Kelly (White Dee from Benefits Street)* – began answering back. And so did the audience (good words from Mik Scarlett, who injected the only disability-related discussion into the evening). Even the chair began to challenge the anti-benefits assertions and pepper his talk with counter facts. Twitter was a torrent, so thick and fast it was a blur. Slowed down, though, and it became clear that fact and experience based tweets from In Actual Fact and others, evidencing the reality of benefits, were holding their own.

Anyway, so successful was Channel 5’s Row in the ratings war that they’ve decided to treat us to The Big British Immigration Row. Channel 4, wearing their cynicism on their sleeves, have scheduled their final programme to compete. So on Monday 17th February it will be a head-to-head knock down, drag out fight between the propaganda of anti-benefits and anti-immigration and… the actual facts.

In partnership with Ros Wynne Jones, who writes the Real Britain column in the Daily Mirror, supporting and reporting on the grassroots struggle against austerity throughout the Coalition government, we will be mass tweeting on Monday 17 February. You can join us in a full 90 minutes of counter propaganda social media civil disobedience! We’ll be tweeting with the #BenefitsBritain hashtag (whilst also adding our immigration-themed tweets to the ‘Immigration Row’ twitter feed)

You may ask yourself, in the vileness of programmes like this, is there any point? When it often feels like two opposing factions shouting in the dark, neither listening to the other, where’s the value? Yet I’ve realised it matters. It’s vital we show there are people who oppose the austerity agenda, in large and increasing numbers; underrepresented in the mainstream media, social media is the place to do it. And I’ve realised over the six months of In Actual Fact that the value goes beyond the twitter feed on the night. These fact-based tweets are retweeted for days, propagating out across other people’s feeds to reach broader and broader constituencies, people who don’t yet know this stuff but might be willing to hear it.

But it’s hard. Watching these programmes takes a toll. Of course it’s possible to tweet from In Actual Fact without putting ourselves through the programme at all. For The Big Benefits Row, I skyped a friend, sharing the outrage and laughing a lot. For Channel 4’s finale, I will twitter party with In Actual Fact’s interns, devising strategy whilst drinking beer and lightening the load. I don’t want to be dragged into the circus, but we must keep getting facts on the record. As the weeks of Channel 4’s further descent into tabloid hell have gone by, we have been winning the argument. So please come along and make sure that The Last Word on Benefits Street is ours.

I can’t say much yet, but it relies on money, vast quantities of clay, sweeping vistas of space, fantastic people mobilising, and keeping my nerve. The only bit that’s certain at the moment is the date of the UK General Election.

I’m really happy to be working with CoQuo PR again after their brilliance on Bedding Out, delighted today to welcome Production Assistant Jess Thomas, and hoping it won’t be too long now until we’re able to invite you to join in.

Event 1: Tuesday 5 November is the People’s Assembly national day of action against austerity, tweeting on #burnausterity. Alongside the many events of the day, we want to raise awareness of In Actual Fact and enourage people to use it to back their anti-austerity campaigns.We’d love you to tweet (and Facebook) on and off throughout that day direct from the In Actual Fact site, adding the #burnausterity hashtag at the end of tweets (you might have to modify some tweets to squeeze it into the character limit).Please also use twitter to tell people about the In Actual Fact site: the counter-propaganda site, giving actual facts about benefits and public services cuts. Include both the #inactualfact and #burnausterity hashtags.

Event 2: Wednesday 6 November 9.00pm, BBC will broadcast Britain on the Fiddle (the first in a series of three). This is a chance to show In Actual Fact working to counter propaganda. We need you to join us, mass-tweeting on the #britainonthefiddle hashtag (you might have to modify some tweets to squeeze it into the character limit).

We’ll be tweeting throughout the hour of the programme and for the hour after, answering every single lie with relevant tweets direct from the IAF site. We’re also planning to use tweets to respond directly to misinformation and bile put out by other people on the #britainonthefiddle thread.

A last blast before I crash for a while. Bedding Out at Edinburgh was a good one: 30 hours of continuous performance, six bedside conversations and an active twitter feed. We talked of the Work Capability Assessment, the social model, performance protest, strength through activism, shaping public opinion, creating our own press, next generation politics, the interconnectedness of systems and people. Audio extracts and twitter conversations will be added to the RGP website soon.

But most of all, we talked of the things we can do to turn the tide on the benefits and cuts onslaught. We can:

Counter propaganda with In Actual Fact: Tweet occasionally, daily, multiple times each day. Submit facts to the website and tell everyone you know about it and get them to tweet too.

As Government and press propaganda about the cuts and benefit claimants continues to skew public opinion towards division and hatred¹ , we urgently need to answer back with the actual facts.

Misrepresentation of official statistics is being use for political gain and justification for a reinvented, cut-back benefits system² that is leading to profound distress and multiple deaths.³

But it is time for us to start shaping public opinion for ourselves, until governments and would-be-governments have no choice but to address the damage they are doing.

And that’s where our new project, created with the invaluable help of CoQuo, comes in. Today, we launch In Actual Fact.

In Actual Fact is a collection of actual facts that seek to combat the rhetoric of governments and the press. Each fact is short, memorable and instantly tweetable, providing bite-sized information for users to call on when answering back. All facts are carefully sourced and we invite you to submit additional facts for us to continue expanding the facility.

This is a resource to use and build upon – intuitive one-click activism that is engaging, widely accessible and with the potential to make an impact. Tweet occasionally, tweet daily or tweet multiple times each day. Make In Actual Fact your browser’s home page so that it reminds you. Tell everyone you know about the site and get them to tweet too.

In the process of designing the new site, we sifted through all the existing materials and I realised I’ve done more than I’d ever known over the past 13 years of RGP. There’s some great material on there and it feels kind of good!

This new site makes it much easier to find archived material and also introduces lots of new materials. All our films and other productions are now available to watch online, free of charge, and with audio description, captions and BSL. We’d welcome your feedback.

With Bedding Out in Edinburgh just abound the corner, here are a few Bedding Out-themed highlights:

I’ve recently been editing the thousands of tweets from April’s Bedding Out, reformatting them for a web archive. The range and depth of the conversations has amazed me, from invitations to MPs to shouting out at Esther McVey, media hatred and countering lies, wearing expressions to witch trials, marathon sleepovers and celebratory brownies, falling through gaps and dying whilst found ‘fit for work’, WCA tips and collective answering back, and much more. It’s an amazing resource of compassion, rage, humour, strategy and eloquence, all in 140 characters. And they’ll be uploaded any day now…

The #beddingout twitter feed will be active again for Edinburgh, so please join the conversation. This week, I was so sorry to lose the wonderful Dawn Willis @Quinonostante as tweetmeister this time around and I want to wish the very best to her son Matt for the speediest recovery. I’m also very pleased to welcome Laura @Ambir, from WOW Petition, stepping into the breech and tweeting from the heart of #beddingout in Edinburgh. Getting exciting now…

Where Salisbury and the livestream became a connecting of disabled people and building of strategy, Edinburgh is set to be a different beast. This time we’ll be soaking in the upbeat feel of the festival to reach people new to the debate. Rick and Jane of WOW Petition will be joining me at the bedside, to spread the word about the impact of cuts and propaganda on disabled people in order to mobilise allies and collect petition signatures along the way.

The fantastic Dawn Willis, tweetmeister, will be joining the project again to coordinate the twitter feed and I hope those who joined in before on twitter will continue to be part of #beddingout.

Three conversations will happen around the bed and two more will run on twitter. I’m just now doing the final edit of twitter conversations from last time, wrestling thousands of tweets into the Bedding Out archive on the RGP website. The range, depth, inspiration, rage and hope contained in the conversations is electric and I’m hoping for that same energy in Edinburgh.

I’ll be bedding out at the Hunt & Darton Café. In this fully functioning installation café that blends art with the everyday, Bedding Out will offer an escape from festival frenzy for a slower paced, more contemplative, chill zone in which I hope to build a sense of cool and determined possibility. Meanwhile, Black Triangle are linking up with Bedding Out, plotting a performance spin-off, a little less chilled but just as filled with possibility…

It would be great to meet some of you in Edinburgh and via twitter, so please join us if you can and let’s take the conversation and campaign even further.

I’ve been at the Bristol Records Office recently, trawling through the archives of The Guild of the Brave Poor Things. One of a network of membership groups for disabled people, the Bristol Guild was founded in 1896 and became the first to have its own purpose built headquarters. Bringing together disabled people in a social space, the Guild lay on entertainment, companionship, training, sales of works and apprenticeships.

Membership was pretty exacting: you needed the right impairment (physical or sensory, visible), and enough of it but not too much. It helped a lot to be male. Most of all though, you needed the right moral character, exhibiting the ‘Guild spirit’ and signing up to its ideals. Above all, the Guild set out to prevent disabled people from being a burden on society.

As I read the reams of closely written copperplate from almost 120 years ago, the sort of disabled person you needed to be and the drive towards work for independence, wellbeing and morality, feels so very contemporary. I can hear the Coalition mantra echoing through the century: ‘Strivers not Shirkers’. Now, as then, the aim is that disabled people should overcome and inspire all the way to economic self-sufficiency. Then, as now, employers were not always keen to be a part of the solution.

And yet there’s one critical difference. Then – for all the charitable and tragic overtones – there is a feeling of liberation unfurling. Against a backdrop of poverty, inaccessibility and social exclusion, and long before the welfare state was formed, lives were being transformed. The Guild of the Brave Poor Things was not a self-help group, but certainly it was a place where group identity had a chance to form.

The Bristol Guild (eventually renamed The Guild of the Handicapped) continued right up to 1987 when the building was sold and it re-registered as a charitable trust. The same year, oblivious that the Guild had ever existed, a small group of disabled people held our inaugural meeting for what would become Avon Coalition of Disabled People. We gathered through the generosity of Community Service Volunteers, in the middle of their busy lobby, since Bristol then had not a single public building that was accessible. CSV is just 200 yards up the road from the Guild.

Arriving at the converted church that is Salisbury Arts Centre, my home for the 48 hours of Bedding Out, the altar stage looked breathtakingly beautiful. Plotted and planned as it was, I was not prepared for the theatre of it: a wall of white drapes behind the bed picking up on the white of the bedding and echoing the large canvas sails suspended above; the red of the bed throw picking up in colour the stained glass that rose high above the drapes; the black of the stage adding drama and the wooden frame of the bed, warmth. Above me, my view from the bed, black rafters criss-crossed the underbelly of the roof.

I measured the hours in fractions: 1/4, 1/3, 1/2, and on to the final 48th, interrupting them with conversations around the bed and with the world beyond through twitter. And in between I rested, recovering from one conversation and preparing myself for the next.

Behind the scenes, the crew was a hive of activity, managing a livestream and a twitter feed, preparing live captioning and BSL interpretation for the next conversation, and PAing for me, all with a steady calm that carried me through the 48 hours. Through a livestream watched in 18 countries, a continuous twitter feed comprising thousands of messages interconnecting, and extra twitter conversations laid on to cope with demand, there was a sense of something extraordinary unfolding.

If the conversations in the arts centre and via social media were visibly active, in the long hours between, where I looked to be sleeping, plenty of work was taking place. People have commented on how vulnerable I was making myself, revealing my private self through the performance, but the vulnerability was more in receiving such a weight of expectation, despair and urgent hope in such a public forum. For me, the 48 hours, in and between the conversations, shaped and formed my thinking about how we might understand the attack on whole swathes of our society, about how we might bear witness to the isolated pain of individuals whilst turning it towards ever-more collective resistance.

In the weight of people’s stories, what I heard was the impact that public vilification can have: the bewilderment at injustice, the injustice of extreme misrepresentation, the pain of losing our fragile security, the ever-present fear of backlash. But entwined within each story was profound compassion, dignity, contribution, and resilience despite all; every story encapsulated the humanity that most of us would choose to live amongst. These are not stories of skivers and scroungers, nor do they carry the victim label that equally endangers. Beyond the bed, I am left with the question of how we interweave pain and resolve more publicly, and in a way that reflects its complexity, in order to turn it towards change.

As we oppose the specific details of benefits changes, such as the points system used to assess PIP claimants, we need to site them in the context of the values that underpin and are used to justify those changes. Driving them all are the values of individualism and of some social groups as worth less. These values applied to disabled people are being applied to others too. If disabled people were the first, we were never going to be the last. Now it is unemployed people, poor people, single parents, immigrants, the under-25s; next it is to be people deemed to be earning too little. In a process of divide and rule, there is an ever-greater need for collective action between us all.

In the run up to Bedding Out, I noticed the government’s increasing references to public opinion: a majority population supports these changes to benefits and other public services, believing benefit fraud to be out of control and public spending to be a primary cause of the economic crisis. Yet public opinion, as it stands, has been skewed and tainted by selective use and misrepresentation of official statistics for political gain.¹ Alongside government briefings, most newspapers continue to engage in a propaganda offensive associated with a doubling in hate crime.² The Coalition uses these falsehoods to justify a reinvented and cut-back benefits system that is leading to multiple deaths.

When government sets such store by public opinion, holding it as the barometer of its re-electability, when public opinion is so central to winning the argument, then it is essential that we become the ones to shape it. If public opinion, with such devastating consequences, is being formed through invented statistics and fabulations of what we are, then we need to counter it at every turn with true facts and true stories.

We need to identify who in the press (predominantly Guardian journalists) are doing the sustained investigative reporting and supply them with our stories. We need to use our own media (“tweet it, blog it talk it, live it”) in every way that each of us can in order to realise the furthest reach of our influence.

New research reveals a more complex division in public opinion than most polls suggest: once people know someone affected by the cuts, they are more likely to be swayed against the Coalition’s policies.³ To shift public opinion, we need to become known. We need to reach out to the ‘good, kind and compassionate’ people who would be horrified if they only knew, or who feel disquiet but do not speak out; we need to communicate to them facts about benefits and stories of our lives as they really are and to show why it matters so much to speak out. We need to tell stories of what it is to be ‘us’, what it is to be a claimant, what social security really is and what it does, how it is really spent and the breadth of its benefits. We need to counter the values that permit labelling of some social groups as less, that foster division and scapegoating. We need to become the ones informing and shaping public opinion, mobilising it and building collective momentum. We need to create an unequivocal cry of “Not in my name,” that leaves politicians of all parties realising they have no choice but to heed us.

And we need to extend beyond simple opposition to ask the big questions: what kind of society we want to be and how do we get there? We need to devise working alternatives to the current onslaught, to find out what a humane and inclusive social security system would look like and how it would be implemented and sustained.

So here’s what, for now, is emerging from 48 hours of Bedding Out:

• We are hearing multiple stories of people connected, of people feeling represented and changing how they manage their public/private selves, of people integrating their health needs better and finding their ‘fear of the brown envelope’ diminished. We are hearing of people inspired to speak out as they would not have done before, countering propaganda through words and text, through art and direct action. These are stories of crisis and stories of resilience, solutions, mobilising and collective resistance.

• We are amassing a bank of true facts and stories. These will be uploaded to our website and distributed via other sites and social media in easily tweetable, easily memorable bite-sized facts and stories, in tweets, blogs, links, photographs and videos, for people to call to help them in answering back.

• We will re-present the twitter feed, which is filled with interesting and wide-ranging conversation and commentary, so that it becomes a permanent, practical resource with conversation threads clear, searchable and grouped thematically.

• There have been repeated calls for a national Bedding Out guerrilla action, for a big splash visible representation of who and what we are, that will incorporate people in public spaces and people from their beds, and there are people beginning to work towards this.

• There is interest in creating a project less visible, a peer support network in which we help each other with form-filling and tribunal-survival, building individuals’ resilience for both personal survival and opposition.

If you’re interested in any of these projects, please get in touch and I’ll pass your details on to the relevant person.

This week, I was asked do I really think we have a hope in hell of turning the tide, or is this just a “valiant protest” so we can say we “fought the good fight until the end”? And even as premonitions are not my thing (and perhaps not the Coalition’s either, given the state of economic recovery), what I know is this: if we don’t fight back, failure is certain. And if we do fight back, then we stand a chance. If we contest every last one of the Coalition’s and press lies, if we bite back against policy and ideology that treats whole swathes of society as less, then we stand a chance.

Government has huge resources which we can only dream of, yet over the past three years I have been in awe of the strengths that have emerged amongst disability activists: skills and strategies, new alliances, deep compassion and hard won experience, complex organisation and resilience. And, strange as it may seem to call this a strength, to call it something the Coalition could only dream of, I see how raw desperation drives us. The reality is that our community, and individuals within it, are fighting for our lives, and that makes us, united, the most formidable of oppositions.#beddingout@RGPLizCrow
info [at] roaring-girl [dot] comroaring-girl.com

On the eve of Bedding Out, there’s mounting excitement in the twittersphere and my stomach is looping the loop. Will the work do something? (Will my body do what’s needed?) Will people join in and make the project work?

I am back at the eve of my Fourth Plinth performance in Trafalgar Square. Then, it was the uncertainty of performance that proved its power. Then, it created a starting point, a moment, where the onlooker was confronted with questions and a place where other campaigners and activists could gather anduse the opening it provided.

I remember then, as anxiety created its own momentum, stopping it from running out of control depended on my returning to the why: the absolute essence of what I am doing. It was there that clarity lay, and the guts to see it through.

So here’s is the why of Bedding Out:

It is the peddling of myths about disabled people and those in poverty that bear no relation to our lives as they really are. It is the notion of us, in and out of paid work, as feckless and shiftless, fraudster and scrounger, as workshy and morally bankrupt that ignores the many influences of a person’s capacity to work and sets us aside as ‘other’.

It’s the use of those myths to justify cuts and introduce a system of benefits that ensure those who most need support are most likely to fall through the gaps.

It’s the way those myths link to soaring hate crime, distress and even suicide, and yet are exploited for political gain. It is the way we must edit ourselves to stay safe.

It’s the lie that austerity is caused by us when it comes out of inequality, and it’s the way that inequality only magnifies with government policies like these.

It’s the way disabled people were the first, virtually unreported for the first two years, but we were never going to be the last. Now it’s unemployed people, poor people, single parents, immigrants, the under-25s; next it is to be people deemed to be earning too little.

It’s the way that even as the poor are punished by income cuts, the rich are rewarded with income tax cuts and corporations with tax evasion condoned.

It’s the way that good people are swayed by lies, or distracted by their own struggles, or silenced from speaking out for fear they could be next, or intimidated by increasingly aggressive suppression of protest.

It’s the way that government policy, and the absence of opposition, threatens our futures, the way that it confines and divides and degrades us all. It’s the way that it punishes non-conformity, says we are motivated only by greed, unravels 30 years of disability progress, undoes democracy. It’s the knowing that there are better ways of working and contributing and living alongside each other if only we care to look.

And it is the way some of us have banded together – in Disability People Against the Cuts, Spartacus, Black Triangle and more – in a sustained campaign of answering back. It’s about the awe I feel at the strengths that have emerged: the skills and strategies, alliances formed, deep compassion and resilience, and at new ways of campaigning from home and sofa and bed.

It’s about the possibilities of all the different individuals and groups joining forces to create an opposition. It’s the way that a gathering momentum could yet create a collective and unequivocal cry of ‘Not in my name,’ until politicians of all parties realise they have no choice but to heed us. Which is also about hope and becoming part of a much bigger decision to shape a future that is so much better.

So that’s why. In Bedding Out, I am portraying a human story in its broader political context. It’s about combining with all the other voices to create a very different story of what it is to be us and to feed into the debate about what kind of society we want to be.

In the words of John Lennon, adapted, let’s start a revolution from my bed.

On the web:Bedding Out will be live streamed throughout the 48 hours at www.roaring-girl.com. Bedside Conversations will be live streamed with audio, BSL interpretation and live subtitles.

On Twitter:
Follow @RGPLizCrow and use the #beddingout hashtag to take part throughout the 48 hours. Join our Twitter-based Bedside Conversation on Thu 11 Apr at noon.

By text:
Anyone not on Twitter can text us: 07784 899514 and we can upload what they say to Twitter. Typing ‘MySecret’ before the message ensures that their message will be tweeted anonymously.

Bedside Conversations:
Members of the public gather round the bed to talk about the work, it’s background and its politics.
Free entry. Duration 40 minutes. Book at Salisbury Arts Centre website: uk.patronbase.com/_SAC/Productions or phone: 01722 321744
Or watch online at www.roaring-girl.com (with BSL interpretation and live subtitles)